The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows

by Archer, Angelique

  Kennedy’s breath caught in her throat, and she instinctively thrust her hand to her right side, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. She stood there, uncertain, immobile… things she had never been back in Afghanistan when she was a gunnery sergeant leading her men beyond the wire to provide security for convoys. She’d dealt with suicide bombers, seen people get blown apart by an IED… but never before had she witnessed an enemy like this.

  She could see Oliver crying from where he sat in the flowerbed, his little white sailor shirt streaked with blood that was not his own, but over the blare of the music and the children, no one heard him.

  The two boys following the man crouched down to her nephew, and at first Kennedy thought they wanted to play with him. Oliver stopped crying for a second and extended one of his toys to them, an invitation to join him and play.

  But when they shoved him backward into the dirt, blocking him entirely from her view, Kennedy’s face became ghost-white, and her mouth opened in a silent scream.

  Cheyenne was only a few feet away and saw Kennedy’s horrified expression. She froze when she took in what her sister-in-law had just witnessed.

  “Matt!” she shrieked to her husband and waddled as fast as she could toward her son. She reached Oliver and pushed the two boys out of the way, forcibly ripping them away from him, and knelt down to cradle her child against her belly. When he remained unmoving, she let out a wail of despair.

  Her cry was cut short when she was suddenly yanked backward by Kennedy’s uncle and the neighbor. She was still holding Oliver, clutching him against her protectively, shielding him from the macabre threats that surrounded them.

  The last thing Kennedy remembered was seeing Oliver’s little mouth sink into his mother’s belly.

  It was an image that would haunt her forever.

  Chapter One

  Faster.

  The booming thunder of the horse’s hooves pierced the silence of the night, rhythmic and steady and powerful. The moon sat high in the sky, its beams shimmering along the pearlescent mane and smooth golden coat of the palomino. Haven leaned forward in the saddle, urging the palomino from a canter to a gallop, both of them hot in pursuit of the ravenous wind.

  Icy air nipped at her face, cutting the soft skin of her cheeks like a thousand tiny knives.

  But the sensation was delicious.

  For just a moment, Haven felt as though she was flying, the combination of speed and energy beneath her an intoxicating, indulgent concoction. She inhaled deeply, savoring the coolness of the night air, the magical beauty of the sky covered in a blanket of twinkling stars, the rich scent of the brown leather saddle, her heart beating in unison with the pounding of the animal’s hooves.

  On any other night, this would have been a dream. But tonight was different. Tonight she was going back to where it all began. She was going to find her sister.

  After scouring the surrounding area for days now, covering miles footstep by hopeful footstep, there was still no sign of sweet Faith.

  It’s all your fault. You did this. You are a terrible sister, a terrible human being. You.

  You.

  YOU.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t undo what she had done. She couldn’t tune out the guilt-ridden voice that hissed at her from within.

  Houston would be angry with her if he knew she had left, especially alone, at night, and on a horse. But she couldn’t take the Jeep. What if something happened at the farmhouse where Houston and her brother slept, what if a horde came in the middle of the night, and they had no way to escape?

  Unfortunately, the clip-clop of the hooves did attract unwanted guests. The horse saw the zombie before Haven, alerting her to its approach by lunging to the side, nearly throwing her.

  Haven whispered soothingly to the horse, petting it reassuringly. The zombie shambled out of the yard of a farmhouse, gritty and weathered and extremely gaunt. Its wisps of white hair against its greenish-gray scalp reminded Haven of the Crypt Keeper from the television show “Tales of the Crypt.”

  It reached out to her and groaned pitifully, its bulbous eyes straining. Haven curled her lip in disgust. The creature’s face was grotesquely disfigured. One eye sat lower than the other, as though its face was melting into itself as the skin decayed. Its nose was gone, likely bitten off, and it only had a few teeth remaining. Each time it opened its mouth to moan, the skin of its left cheek opened to reveal a gaping hollow. It had such little strength to remain upright that when it took a swipe at her, it collapsed to the ground only to painstakingly pick itself back up again, the dry bones creaking and popping from the effort.

  She didn’t want to waste time to dismount and put the zombie down for good. There were only a few hours remaining before daylight and still many miles to cover. She looked over her shoulder again, seeing more zombies staggering out of the mist, before gently encouraging the spooked horse back into a faster trot. They would never catch her as long as she kept moving.

  The thought of Faith out there hungry, scared, and alone was incredibly painful. Especially in this terrifying new world where everything good was eagerly devoured by evil.

  Faith had to be alive. She just had to be.

  Ten miles outside of Columbus, Georgia

  A few hours earlier…

  It started the same way it always did.

  The faces of her brother, her sister-in-law, her little nephew... Kennedy could see them, and she reached for them desperately, begging them to stay with her, but the wispy ghosts of their memory swirled away from her, swallowed up by the impending darkness.

  Her eyes flew open.

  Startled, she looked around frantically, realizing she was in her bed, completely alone.

  She rubbed at her temples and clenched her teeth. She didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to go back to that day. If she could just go back, she could change everything.

  Squeezing her eyes shut again, she tried to will herself back to her nightmare, a nightmare that kept replaying itself night after night, one that seemed so real she almost believed if she made the right choices, she could change the horrific outcome.

  Today, she and her team were en route to get fuel and supplies in Columbus. They’d split up, and now she was regretting it.

  One part of the team had taken the fuel truck to go to the storage terminals on the outskirts of the city that housed fuel from the refineries. The remaining team had hopped into the pick-up truck they left nearby, but it had broken down in the middle of the road after only a handful of miles.

  Johnny B. was working to fix it, and while she and Grady kept watch, they were approached by a little boy.

  But not just any little boy.

  This little boy had red hair, and her heart had stopped. She fell to her knees, grief-stricken.

  What had once been a child eyed both her and Grady and, sensing she was the easier prey, stepped toward her, fingers straining and clawed. The pint-sized zombie had been the victim of a fresh kill, and its limbs were still mobile enough to move quickly. Vacant eyes stared at her, soulless, nothing in them aside from a rabid desire to feed.

  Kennedy had watched the zombie for a moment, stunned as she knelt there in the dead, wet leaves, the moisture of the earth seeping in through her fatigues. Her finger rested on the trigger of her firearm, and while every ounce of her being wanted to pull it and end the tiny creature’s misery, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “Oliver,” she whispered. But it wasn’t.

  Johnny B. heard her, poked his head around the open hood of the truck, and quickly moved to protect her. He fired a couple of shots with his rifle, giving the boy permanent rest.

  Usually he had an off-color joke ready for whenever they killed them, but today, he silently walked over to her and helped her to her feet.

  And that was why he was one of her best men. He always had her back.

  The truck didn’t start again in spite of Johnny B.’s tinkering, and they had no choice but to continue
until they either found another vehicle or picked up their pace and completed the journey to Columbus on foot.

  Trying her hardest to remain calm, Kennedy had told them she wanted to bury the boy, and she wanted to do it alone.

  Initially, they’d refused to leave her, but she had been insistent that she would catch up to them. To split up was stupid in these times, but she needed space and didn’t want them to see her crumble.

  After they’d left, she buried the zombie, digging a hole with the Gerber packable shovel they kept in the truck, and sobbed silent tears of regret until a small mound of fresh dirt was the only evidence the child had ever existed. She slumped beside the boy’s resting place, wiping her forehead with her now-blistered hand and leaving a streak of mud in its wake.

  And while she stared at the grave of the little boy, she kept replaying that fateful day where she lost them all.

  The truth was, she would never be able to go back in time. She would never be able to save her family.

  Then there was shouting in the distance and the steady staccato of gunfire.

  Craning her neck, she listened intently.

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood erect.

  Voices.

  Voices that sounded oddly like her men.

  She broke into a fast run, her boots crashing noisily through the forest. She wouldn’t let them down.

  Kennedy noticed a group of zombies ahead of her, no doubt following the sound of gunfire, but they turned as a unit toward her when they heard her galloping down the path. She shot at the two closest to her and smashed another in the face with the butt of her gun. Her breathing steady, she kept running through the haunted forest, past motionless corpses and splattered blood on the trunks of trees.

  She immediately picked out the voices of Johnny B. and Grady, but another was unfamiliar to her, foreign. When she found them, they were standing around a figure with their weapons raised. The newcomer was on his knees, his head lowered and shoulders slumped.

  “What happened?” she called out, finally slowing to a light jog until she reached them.

  Grady stepped back to speak to her. He had a graying ponytail, and while he wasn’t the giant that Johnny B. was, he was resourceful, quick-thinking, and an excellent marksman. He was the oldest of her small supply run crew, retired Air Force, so the three of them got along well from the very beginning when they met on the road leaving Dallas. She trusted all of her men, but Grady’s calm countenance made him the one she sought advice from first because she knew he wouldn’t give her an emotional response when wise counsel was needed. “Came across a big group of these things. They were trying to eat him.” He thrust his thumb over his shoulder and pointed to the stranger. “At first, we thought he was one of them, he was so dirty. Then we heard him yelling at the zombies, and we realized he was alive.”

  “Alive and stupid, not doing jack shit to take ‘em down. Just yellin’ at them and drawing more in,” Johnny B. muttered disdainfully. He was from the Midwest, tan skin with tousled brown hair, in his mid-thirties like Kennedy. He towered over the rest of them, and where Grady was the brains of her men, Johnny B. was the brawn, intimidating with his presence alone. They’d met in boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, but she’d been shipped off to Afghanistan while he went to Iraq. He had been at a friend’s bachelor party in Austin, Texas at the onset of the outbreak. Having no family of his own, he remembered Kennedy was in Dallas and had gone to find her when everything started to get crazy. After years of keeping in touch, he knew her family well and had spent many weeks of leave with them. He was the first to find her at her brother’s house in Dallas. She’d been in bad shape when he got to her, and true to form, he remained diligently by her side, helping her put down and bury her zombified brother and his family. He took care of her in the days that followed until she pulled herself up by her bootstraps and decided it was time to leave and try to help the same citizens of the country they had sworn to protect. Johnny B. was someone she knew she could always count on, someone who would always have her back, someone who would follow her into the depths of hell if she asked. And in a sense, he was the only family she had left.

  Kennedy studied the stranger. He was covered from head to toe in grime, the whites of his eyes the only feature visible through the mud on his face. “So why are we aiming our guns at him? We help survivors; we don’t threaten them.”

  “We don’t know if he’s been bitten or not, and he refuses to let us examine him,” Grady replied, bringing a scowl from the newcomer.

  Sighing, Kennedy walked over to him.

  “Hi, there,” she said, kneeling to eye level.

  “I’m not one of them,” the man croaked. She was surprised to hear a strong accent.

  Grunting and rolling his eyes, Johnny B. shoved him forward with his boot, sending the man tumbling face first into the cold mud. “Listen to this fucking leprechaun. Can’t even understand him. Sounds like he has marbles in his mouth.”

  The man whirled around, crouched in a combative stance, a crowbar held firmly in his hands. “Leprechauns are Irish, you bloody idiot.”

  Grady stepped protectively between Kennedy and the stranger and leveled his rifle at the newcomer’s head. “I’m gonna tell you one more time. Do what we say, or I’m spraying your gray matter all over the forest floor.”

  “Hey,” Kennedy chided him quietly, moving around Grady so that she was once more in front of the stranger. “That’s enough.”

  The man squinted to see who she was, but it was difficult to make out any details in the dark.

  Kennedy smiled just a little, her green eyes narrowing. “I’m Kennedy.” She reached out and extended her hand. He warily rose to his feet, but didn’t greet her. She dropped her hand to her side, and he noticed that her fingers grazed her firearm as he tightened his grip on the crowbar. “Ponytail over there,” she explained, pulling on her own, “is Grady, and Mister Muscles over here, who sure seems to want to be your friend… he goes by ‘Johnny B.’ He’s actually not so bad once you get to know him, if you can get past the perverted jokes, that is.”

  The others had lowered their weapons from their shoulders, but still kept their fingers poised over the triggers, eyeing him skeptically.

  He clutched the crowbar in his hands more firmly. “I don’t need rescuing.”

  “You could have fooled me. Rotters would’ve been on you like a hobo on a hotdog. My men here saved your ass.”

  “Yeah, they’re just your regular, everyday guardian angels. That meathead over there nearly knocked my teeth out,” he replied bitterly, spitting a mouthful of blood on the ground.

  Kennedy ignored his sarcasm. “Were you bitten?”

  “What?” he asked, still dazed.

  Her posture was relaxed, but there was an edge to her tone that hadn’t been there before.

  “Bitten. Were you bitten?” she repeated, placing great emphasis on each word.

  He shook his head. “No.” Snorting angrily, he added, “And what the hell does it matter to you?” His piercing green eyes glared at her.

  Kennedy signaled to the men flanking her. They moved forward and surrounded him. “You won’t mind then if my friends do a quick check to be sure? You can set your crowbar down on the ground.”

  The stranger took a step back and raised the crowbar. It was so measly compared to the weapons they carried; he didn’t stand a chance against them. Something was better than nothing though, and if she thought he was going to give up his only means of defense, she was nuts.

  “I guess that would be a negative,” she said. “Look, I really don’t want to be a pill, but it’s protocol. If you’re coming back with us, you need to be checked. And in order to be checked, you’ll have to be unarmed.”

  Kennedy remained resolute, her stance indicating that she wasn’t going to change her mind anytime soon.

  The man’s attitude wasn’t uncommon; they were often shown it by most survivors they rescued. Suspicion, contempt, distrust. She u
nderstood those emotions, she really did. After all, without those instincts, they wouldn’t have survived even the first weeks of the outbreak. From the stranger’s perspective, they could very well strip him of all his limited supplies and carve him up into a tasty filet mignon. She had seen worse. It was three to one, and the odds were not in his favor. Knowing this, she tried to exercise patience, but her rules would stand; there was no room for risk, no room for negotiation in this new world. A bite was a bite.

  “Who said anything about wanting to go back with you?” the man retorted indignantly.

  “Well, I’d say you haven’t slept in a week…” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “And by the smell of you, I would bet money that you haven’t had a shower for maybe longer.” She studied him a bit more. “You look hungry. Thirsty, too. I gotta tell you, I don’t think you’re doing so well on your own by the looks of it.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, and she saw the resignation in his expression.

  Kennedy shrugged. “It’s no skin off my back if you stay; suit yourself. But if we don’t check you, you won’t be returning with us.” She pushed up her sleeve and revealed a black sports watch. “Whatever you decide, you need to make up your mind. It’s eighteen hundred hours, and we’re out of daylight. More rotters are going to come sniffing since they heard gunshots. I don’t want me and my men out here when that happens. So what’s it gonna be?”

  The man tightened his jaw. The alternative wasn’t appealing. He didn’t want to wander alone like he had before he met the last group. The isolation was maddening.

  “And where exactly would I be going back to with you fine people?”

  She glanced at the other men. “We can’t disclose that at this time—”